Trouble the Saints

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  I flinched and then tried to pass it off with a rough jerk of my injured arm, but Walter just waited.

  “I have no idea how Dev found out. He has his sources, you know that.”

  Walter’s eyes crinkled when he smiled. “You aren’t a great liar, Phyllis. Your boy has been working both sides for a long time now.”

  And so I found myself neatly, masterfully and yet fondly, outclassed: Walter knew precisely how much I would sacrifice to keep Dev safe. I considered the utility of denial. I considered pell-mell escape, out the back door and into a safe house with Dev. I could come back to finish Victor later. But once my shock receded, the obvious conclusions asserted themselves: Dev would not still be alive, and Walter would not be telling me extraordinary truths in a basement with no witnesses, if he wanted to use the information to hurt us. But he wanted something from me.

  “How did you know?” I said.

  “Oh, I know almost everything around here. Victor knows what I tell him—those hands of his only work so well. Better to keep your eyes open, I told him that when he first got a taste for that sort of back-door spiritualism. But Vic—” Walter started to say something else and then laughed. The look in his wide eyes made me shiver, and not for myself.

  The door above me opened, letting in a bolus of humid air that damped my skin with the scent of baked concrete. Dev’s voice called, “Pea, are you down there?”

  I gave Walter a wild look, my knife halfway from its holster. “Come on down,” he called. “Your girl’s about to pin me with one of those knives of hers, but you’ve always been a calming influence.”

  “Dev, what the hell are you doing here?”

  He raised his eyebrows and jumped lightly from the middle step. “I’m sure we both have very good explanations. Maybe we could talk upstairs?”

  He wasn’t so crude as to look at Walter, but I caught his implication and sighed. “Don’t bother. He already knows.”

  Dev jerked in surprise. “Well,” he said. “Well, fuck. I hope Victor doesn’t?”

  Walter smiled in that strange way again. “I reckon he doesn’t. Not unless he got very lucky with his latest trophies. Diminishing returns. The hands don’t work like they used to. But Dev, you and I both know you won’t be here much longer anyway.”

  Dev made to put his arm around me, then shook his head and dropped it back to his side. You can wish to be the kind of woman who frightens the world, and still wish to be the kind who can take comfort in her man’s protection.

  I took one step away from him.

  “Don’t make her do this,” Dev said.

  Walter shook his head. “You’ve never been able to stop her before. She’s marked for it. You aren’t, Dev, I don’t care what your police trained you for, or even what your hands have brought you. Let Phyllis finish this business, and get out once and for all. Both of you.”

  Dev stared at him, jaw working. Walter’s eyes were compassionate but implacable. He was right. He had toiled in Victor’s shadow for a very long time. He had given cover to evil that, even now, I did not think he countenanced. He would be better at this job, with his artist’s eye and crackling smarts, than Victor had ever been with other people’s hands. Some twisted honor had never let Walter steal that prize himself. He’d had to wait for me, the only other killer with a will and a chance of succeeding.

  “You’re an artist, Walter Finch,” I said.

  Some kind of light, or understanding, filled the shadows between us. He bowed his head. “So are you, Phyllis Green.”

  * * *

  The interior of the Pelican was mottled with natural light, dim in some corners and fiercely bright in strips where the sun came through the open doors. In an effort to keep the temperature bearable, heavy industrial fans circulated the air inside, but still the men had discarded their jackets and ties. The dentist looked so casual smoking in his rolled shirtsleeves with the boys at the bar that at first I didn’t recognize him. I knew that he was occasionally convivial with Victor, but it surprised me, somehow, to see the local boys sharing their break with him.

  “Red Man,” he said, “we brought the last of it inside, but they said you were busy down there.”

  My old lover glanced at me and then awkwardly away. It unsteadied me to see him again, though I hadn’t spared him much thought in the last week. It pricked my vanity, if not my heart, that he had left me so cleanly.

  “Did you bring enough nitrous oxide this time?” Walter asked.

  The dentist gave me another nervous glance. “Just what Victor asked.”

  “Oh,” I said. Of course.

  After Maryann West was fired from her job, Victor would have needed another supplier, someone with unfettered access to regulated pharmaceuticals. The dentist looked at home with the soldiers because he’d always been one of them.

  Had he known what it meant, when I told him about my dream with the hands? Or did he just give the drugs to Victor and make sure to never ask questions? Tamara had known, I realized—her strange little joke about “difficult extractions.” And here I had imagined that Tamara had kept herself ignorant of the ugly underbelly of her high water bird.

  Victor had been sitting in the shadows beside the false bookshelf. He stood up now and waved me over.

  “Good to see you out of bed, angel,” he said. “I suppose you’re feeling…?”

  “Like shit,” I called amiably, and squeezed Dev’s hand hard enough to crack the knuckles. “Get out,” I whispered, and left him before he could respond.

  Victor looked me over, messy hair to scuffed shoes, and said, “Well, can’t say it doesn’t show. To be expected, right, after a bullet in the chest. I expect you heard that we’ve got a rat among us? That some ungrateful rat tried to kill me? They’ll regret it, I promise you. I know you were in bed all day, right, but let’s just make sure. Put that knife of yours on the table there and come back to my office.”

  I put the knife on the table and then let Jack pat me down for any others. There weren’t any. I’d only brought that one because I’d figured it would look strange if I came unarmed. Victor smiled that chrome smile and flicked an incisor with his fingernail.

  “Well, then, come with me, angel. Won’t take a…”

  Lifetime, I thought, and followed him back.

  Zero goes last.

  * * *

  Each silver tooth marked a pair of hands. A mouth full of death, in love with its own reflection.

  * * *

  A hard number. Two suicide kings fighting over blood and ash. A sword behind one and an axe behind the other. One has heart but the other has power—who will come out alive? Depends on how the luck is blowing. Hearts and diamonds, sugar, all that love and brute force.

  * * *

  He’d left a bowl of that soup on the desk. White dumplings shimmering with fat, plucked with his fingers from yellow broth. He ruminated on one while Jack closed the door behind us. He licked his fingers clean of the juice and then wiped them on a silk hankie, silver to match his tie.

  “Just like my mother made them,” Victor said. “The trick is in the mixture of the meat, pork and beef. Nice to see you back on your feet, Phyllis. Sadly, Maryann West won’t be needing your services, but I’ve got a few others…” He smiled, and I had the hideous impression that I could see myself in his silver teeth.

  You can’t win, but I don’t think this has been about winning for a long time now. These cards, they’re talking about survival, and sometimes to survive, you’ve got to make a move. Even if it might kill you.

  Recommendation: Play.

  10

  “I’m retiring, Victor.”

  My voice was wary, even as I scanned the room. The silver penknife at the edge of the desk was provocative but too obvious, and the metal was too soft to penetrate bone. The empty Russian candelabra was a better bet, if he gave me time to swing it. But I guessed that I had one chance, and so a throw would be safer. Bludgeon, then. One of those heavy glass tumblers by the sideboard would do nicely,
if it struck on the bottom edge. And it would, if I threw it.

  My hands had never felt stronger, more full of energy, of a sweet, heady singing.

  Victor chuckled and shook his head. “This is Dev’s influence, I’m guessing. You finally take him back and this is what I get?”

  He stood, fished another dumpling from the broth, and popped it whole into his mouth. His cheeks bulged while he chewed; drops of pink juice gathered on the ashy hair of his mustache. He walked around the desk and over to the sidebar. As he passed I caught a whiff of something rich and gamy, like food but also like flesh. He played his game well, forcing an unbalanced move.

  “Get me a fucking drink if you’re going to keep yammering at me, Vic,” I said. “I’d rather be back in bed, but I’ll settle for bourbon.”

  Victor tsked. “Got a mouth on you, dollface. But sure, anything for my angel.” He poured two generous shots, dropped in two lopsided spikes of ice, and walked back over to hand me one. His eyes were glassy, as though he’d been drinking all morning, but he didn’t smell of liquor, he smelled of meat.

  I stared at him, and the bottom dropped out. Only the most rigid control kept me from shaking. I would die, I knew it.

  To kill him—to right the balance of my debt—I would have to tear myself apart and still, somehow, keep breathing.

  Dev had kissed my knuckles that morning, each one separate, a saint’s devotion.

  I said, “I heard a funny thing this morning.”

  “You did?” Victor said. “A coincidence, Phyllis, since I’ve heard a lot of funny things about you lately, too. You left your place two nights ago, a couple of hours before that rat tried to kill me. And do you know, I just remembered—something fell in the alley before they got away. Clattered on the stones. A gun, right? But it didn’t go off. And it sounded lighter than a gun, right? So what do you make of that?”

  “Could have been a knife,” I said blandly.

  Victor crunched ice between his teeth. “Just what I thought, dollface.”

  We stared at one another. I lifted the tumbler experimentally. It would do, but it would be a shame to waste such good bourbon.

  “They found two more bodies missing hands this morning,” I said. “Which is strange, since Maryann West was already dead.”

  Victor narrowed his eyes and gave me that small, hard smile that was his truest face. “Just some trash, a pair of gypsies no one’ll miss. The police don’t care, don’t know why you do.”

  “I’ve got the hands too, Vic.”

  “And so you do, Phyllis. Which is strange, you know, because I have to tell you in my long experience with you people—let’s be honest for a moment here and admit that it is extensive, right?—I can’t say I’ve ever come across another white girl with the hands. Not that I’m complaining! Good to have one on staff, as it were. But you’re an odd one, Phyllis LeBlanc. Singular, in so many ways.”

  I heard myself laughing.

  So that’s how he knew. How he’d always known, and kept me scrambling to hide myself. Most white folk didn’t even believe in the hands. Figures that the one white man who did would decide to steal them. Like with the poor Barkley brothers, no crime was less interesting to the fine men of the New York Police Department than one acted upon a black or brown body.

  “That funny?” he asked, and I lifted the tumbler, as though to toast him.

  Someone pounded on the door. A soft grunt. It opened and Dev stumbled inside, sweating and wild-eyed.

  “Dev? Where’d Jack get to?” Victor asked.

  “Tied up,” Dev said behind me. I felt that hot wind rise up. The hands told me precisely what they thought of me, and what it was my duty to finish. I, who had taken so many unnecessary lives, would finally execute their perfect justice. There was no more time. They would break me, or I would break myself. I lifted the tumbler and let it fly.

  It should have hit Victor in the temple with enough force to drop a cow.

  My aim was perfect. The hands did not fail me.

  But Dev had rushed me the moment I drew my arm back. He slammed me to the ground just as my hand released. And so the tumbler spun out and shattered to powder against the wall, an inch above Victor’s head.

  I stayed on the floor, groaning. Dev had smashed into my bad shoulder. Deliberately, I knew.

  When I managed to look up again, Dev was slamming Victor’s head against the wall. Victor grabbed his gun, but the shot went wide, cracking the plaster above my head. Dev knocked the gun out of Victor’s hand with his knee, then dragged him to the floor. I hauled myself to one elbow, then to my feet. I kicked the gun, at least, out of reach. My hands were oddly quiet; or perhaps that was merely my own heart, gasping for air. Dev had my five-inch knife, the one I’d left on the table back in the front room. Could I save him from what he’d so clearly determined to do? I could get the last tumbler from the sideboard. Hell, I could throw my shoe.

  My hands spasmed. I watched the man I loved and the man I had resigned myself to murder struggling for their lives on the parquet floor, and I held myself still. I knew why Dev was doing this. And my heart, bruised and twisted but unexpectedly whole, decided to let him.

  Victor shouted until he was hoarse for Red Man and Jack and Marty and anyone else. But he must have known as well as I did: no one would be here to save him. Dev lifted Victor’s shoulders and slammed him with a wet crack on the corner of his desk.

  “You bitch,” Victor sobbed. There was blood and snot in his mustache; blood and spit dribbling from his torn lips. “You fucking bitch—”

  Dev raised the knife and drove it straight into Victor’s sternum. Victor screamed. He bucked against Dev, hitting him again and again across the face and chest; bruising blows made stronger with mortal terror. I knew that strength; I had stumbled away from my kills as soft as pounded meat more times than anyone still human should remember. And now I watched this violence happen to someone I loved, and I held still my hands, which could have stopped it, and did not.

  It will be over soon, I told myself, because Victor and I, we are not good people.

  Dev wrenched the knife from Victor’s chest and brought it down again, a few inches to the right. Victor whined like a dog. He grabbed a fistful of Dev’s hair with a flaccid, bloody hand and pulled down.

  “Phyllis,” he said, a rasp stripped of everything but hate, “I will haunt you for the rest of your life. You will never have a moment’s peace. Dev, you will regret the day you ever met this nigger bitch and I’ll—”

  Dev wrenched out the knife one final time and slammed it—with a crying gasp—into Victor’s temple. Victor slumped away from him, sodden and dead.

  Dev didn’t move. He knelt on his heels with his back to me, so still that I checked the rise and fall of his shoulders to make sure he breathed. I couldn’t look at Victor’s body; I couldn’t stand my cold joy at his death, and my relief at not being his executioner.

  My hands cramped once more with an awful, final pain, and then subsided.

  Perhaps they were right; perhaps I had never been worthy of them.

  I found my courage, held it in the hands I had betrayed and which had at last repudiated me, and knelt to face him.

  “Let me take you home, Dev.” A small house, but you can see the river from the west windows and roses grow in the garden—he had said that to me, the night we ran away.

  A banked light flared in his eyes, and he seemed to see me for the first time. “Oh, Phyllis, how do you stand it?”

  I pulled him to me, as close as I could with one arm. He smelled of a kill—blood and sweat and excrement—but still like himself beneath it all. We were both shaking.

  “First,” I said, “you wash off the blood.”

  THE VIEW

  FROM

  THE RIVER

  Zero. A grifter pawning painted glass; a king of scorched desire. You like long-odd bets, don’t you, sugar? Never happier than when you’re struggling? And there’s no struggle like being in love.

  * * *<
br />
  I went up to Hell’s Kitchen. That time of summer it was a honeycomb of open windows and hard-baked asphalt and exposed tracks that merited its name. I was chasing another lead from another badly overheard conversation: She’s up on Galvin Ave., should be done in an hour. None of those other conversations in the mob joint where I spent hungry nights had panned more than fool’s gold. I went anyway. That’s what detective work is, Dev, I told myself; diligence and boredom that snaps without warning, but never unexpectedly—and then you die, or get promoted.

  I was thinking about that promotion. I was wiping sweat from my eyes. I was hungry and hungover because I only had enough money for food or alcohol—

  —an angel in a blood-drenched evening gown staggered into the alley and vomited into a garbage bin.

  “What are you?” I asked. I already knew. I was holding her around her waist while the last spasms passed through.

  “A knife,” she told me, and it snapped again, the way it would for the rest of my life. Because I would never really know.

  A knife, an angel, a saint. Colored lips in a light-skinned face that parted to speak in tongues, in layers, in seconds and holy eternities. The moment before I knew her and the moment when I loved her. Everything that she held in that pair of uncanny hands.

  In my grandmother’s temple, the goddess Kali wore a skirt of them. That’s what I thought when we kissed later that night, that I could feel the ghostly brush of twenty living fingers. The hard press of a dozen dead hands stiff with rigor mortis against my erection. She asked me what I was thinking and if I hadn’t known I loved her already, I would have known then, because I answered.

  “A skirt of hands?” she said and laughed and shook her hips against mine. She had killed a man two hours before. I would fall in love with other women, but there would never be anyone else for me.